The Lounge is rated PG. If you're about to post something you wouldn't want your
kid sister to read then don't post it. No flame wars, no abusive conduct, no programming
questions and please don't post ads.

If you want to read some great answers, please read the answers from Jon Skeet[^]'s profile. I didn't get much chance to get answers to my (stupid) questions from Mr. Skeet, but as much as he has answered, were some of the best answers in my questioning history. His method of answering a question is just like asking a question to your own friend.

The sh*t I complain about
It's like there ain't a cloud in the sky and it's raining out - Eminem
~! Firewall !~

Not because it has many upvotes or even because I learned something from it (I didn't), but because it's one of those things that no one seems to know about but are very important anyway, and that answer makes it accessible to those people.

Oh, I love that answer. Indeed, it's something kind of obscure and many people (like me) never suspected it, however it makes a tremendous impact on execution speed. And it's a very complicated issue explained in very simple words. Simply brilliant.

First someone needs to figure out how to make non-article content her visible over the long term. CP's forum archives have been invisible to Google for as long as I can remember (probably because performance is(was?) appalling); and I've never seen a QA when I Google something.

Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius

Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt

A bloke at work is organising this as a 'team-building' exercise. I put my name down for as it sounded cool and I like football. It's only now I've researched it, I realise exactly what it is. I don't think my Football skills are going to come in handy[^].

Regular listeners may remember how I tried to replace the pull cord in my bathroom light switch in January, it took me a week to get it fully working, with various intermediate states of working along the way.

Last week I had to have two goes at getting a new shelf to stay up in the kitchen.

So it really was highly optimistic of my wife to expect me to be able to wire in a new light fitting in the hallway in half an hour on Saturday evening, and she only has herself to blame that we had no lights downstairs for the rest of the night.

I got my DIY skills from my dad, and some day I hope to be wealthy enough to pay someone to do the simplest of tasks around the house just like he now does.

Sunday was a success though, I managed to get a new picture up on the wall with only the one nail hammered into the wrong place.

Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.

I really understand this, especially after my episode with a hot water tank last week!

I'm sitting here now looking at my step-son's laptop which he asked me to look at...something wrong with the screen since he used the top of the screen like a handle to move it...of course he doesn't know where the adapter is. After a few weeks I finally find an adapter that will work with it and finally see that the display is completely whacked and appears to have cracks under the surface. And how do we punish reward him for his destructive behavior? The replacement was an iPad. In the meantime, I'm still working on a 6 year old laptop.

Replaced the LCD in my son's Acer tablet that he dropped: everything looks like a photo negative now.

Reverse the polarity.

I'm not joking either. LCD cables use differential signaling, connect them backwards and your 0's will become 1's and vice versa.

Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius

Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt

hmmmm, misaligned in the connector and off by one? I'd've expected that to be a total not work though.

Tiny connectors are hell.

Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius

Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt

The link below is a 2 hour live class (CSCI-33 Programming Microsoft .NET) at Harvard Extension School. You can literally sit in on a Professor teaching a C# class at Harvard. And they wonder why no one majors in Computer Science. It's no mystery.

The web technology related to the lecture is very cool. You can skip around to different sections of the lecture very easily. Check it out. Skip ahead to Hour 01:00:00 where he talks about actual code GetTime() method and see what you think.

I don't know. I guess the web has just jaded me, because the class feels soo slooooow.

It's just amazing that school moves this slowly. You can read an article on this an get much better, in depth information. Thanks for replying. I wonderd if others would feel the same way about the video / teaching method.

that professor has to stretch out all that information into a full semester while not looking foolish.

I think you've perfectly summarized the situation. You could almost go one level deeper and say,

"Parents send children to school to get educated, but public education has been so slow that now University has to go slow for the _average_ learner. Plus, parents would not pay all those 10s and 100s of thousands of dollars for University if you could get a degree in only 1 year. That'd feel like a rip-off. "

When I worked at the University in Jordan, we had a white-hat hacker come in to give a lecture. He had an hour and spent the 30 mins just introducing himself and his list of qualifications. He still allowed himself 15 mins Q&A time. I've never seen a lecturer in the UK introduce himself in this way over and above his (and they were all "he"s) name and contact details. Perhaps this is a US thing - "here are my credentials and here is why you should listen to me" kind of thing??

Anyway, the actual content was 15 mins long, and this consisted of running a tool he'd downloaded. One of the most disappointing sessions I've ever attended.

Our company had a "popular" e-magazine writer come in to teach us how to improve our code and coding practices. His training consisted of “...in my book I explain insert method here in more detail, which is available at IamSuperSmart_BuyMyBooks.com"

The best part is, any of the information I thought was useful wasn’t considered because of cost or for being too difficult to implement.

training consisted of “...in my book I explain insert method here in more detail

That's the way it often goes. Sometimes I marvel that anyone learns anything at any time from any of those things. Maybe they don't. It's a big industry though, so I guess money is being made and that's more important than learning.